Blonde Bombshell by Tom Holt Read Free Book Online Page B

see.
    If it was going to go down to the planet and find out the answer to its questions (Where’s the defence grid? What happened to the Mark One?), it’d need a Dirter identity. It analysed. Dirter identity was founded on an individual identification signifier called a name. It needed a name. Access archives.
    Mark, it discovered, was a perfectly acceptable name for a Dirter male. But most Dirters had at least two names. Fine, it thought, I’ll be Mark Two. But Two turned out not to be culturally acceptable. It checked the linguistic/cultural database and found a suitable near-synonym. All right, it said to itself. Henceforth, my name is Mark Twain.
    Next, it would need a personal history. Dirters attached considerable significance to that sort of thing. It was something to do with their ridiculously short lifespans and their ambivalent attitude towards time. They believed in such things as status, progress, ambition. All a bit pointless, like wars between rival shoals of plankton, but presumably it took their minds off the fact that their lives moved from birth to death in the amount of time young Ostar were allotted for revising for mid-year exams.
    I am Mark Twain, it decided; offspring of Radislav and Irina Twain; born in Trondheim, Norway, but now resident in Archangel; age twenty-nine; IT consultant and freelance technical journalist; favoured Siberian Rules football side the Minsk Marauders, who are going to go all the way this year; preferred food tofu and squid rings; marital status single; musical affiliations Angsty Pangsty, Decaying Orbit and the Lizard-Headed Women. That, apparently, would be enough to define Mark Twain sufficiently precisely to satisfy the curiosity of any of his fellow-Dirters; all they needed to know, in a few conventionalised gobbets.
    It — he — fabricated suitable clothing from synthesised mashed-up plant fibres, and looked at it. The database was silent on the subject of installation procedures, and there were, of course, no instructions. The upper garment, or shirt, proved to be operated by the manipulation of plastic discs into reciprocal slots cut into the edge of the fabric. The lower garment, trousers, was frankly baffling. For a bipedal species to design a leg covering that required the user to take one foot off the ground, thereby abandoning all possibility of keeping his balance, seemed extraordinary, while the idea of fastening the garment with the metallic interlinking-track device was, given the position and vulnerability of the Dirter male sexual organ, frankly terrifying. He managed it eventually, and hoped it was one of those things that got easier with practice.
    A set of identity and financial documents, and an animal-skin holder to keep them in. A communications device, like the one worn by the female in the wood. That was all. He was ready.
    He set the co-ordinates and interfaced with the gravitic scoop: Take me down. Gently, he added, just in time. The scoop grabbed him, and for the briefest possible fraction of a second he was everywhere, everywhen, everything. Then infinity was crammed through a tiny hole in space, and a planet hit him.

7
     
     
    Novosibirsk

    The two men who’d shot George Stetchkin waited till it was dark, then took a cab to the edge of town nearest the PaySoft Industries site. They followed the perimeter fence, walking very carefully so as not to set off any of the state-of-the-art security devices (which nobody knew about apart from Lucy Pavlov, her security chief and half a dozen of his people; but the two men seemed to know exactly where they were, either through amazing intuition or because the little box one of them was holding bleeped whenever they came within sensor range of one of them) until they reached the point where the campus grounds met the forest. There they paused, studied the little box and prodded some of its buttons, and took off all their clothes, which they folded neatly and hid behind a bush. It was a cold night. One